This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [54]
In the closing year of the war Christian Commission representatives became increasingly involved not just in providing information to families but in working to ensure the preservation of the identities of the dead. The night after the Battle of Nashville in December 1864, the general field agent for the Army of the Cumberland described commission delegates searching the field to “gather up the dead, identify them through their comrades, if possible, and mark them by a card.” The delegates had assumed the role of a volunteer graves registration service. After Appomattox the following spring, Christian Commission representatives would search battlefields and burying grounds around Petersburg and Richmond, locating, recording, and protecting soldiers’ graves. Ultimately the commission published this list of interments together with the records of the dead in several Confederate prisons, a total of eight thousand names, “for gratuitous distribution among the friends of the lost.” In the course of the war the Christian Commission had come to recognize that its pastoral duties, its concerns for “spiritual consolation,” and its commitment to Christian souls also involved a commitment to Christian bodies and to the individual identity of the immortal self. This was a service they performed both to comfort the survivors and to demonstrate appropriate respect for the dead, each one of whom was a candidate for divine salvation.14
The Sanitary Commission approached the work of naming the dead rather differently, in keeping with the more general contrasts that distinguished the two agencies. While the Christian Commission was motivated by humanitarian sympathy and religious benevolence, the Sanitarians regarded such an approach as unduly sentimental, lacking the hard-headed realism and the order and discipline necessary to a modern age and a modern war. Working through a system of paid agents, the Sanitary Commission derided the amateurishness inherent in the volunteer efforts of the Christian Commission. The United States Sanitary Commission sought to bring dispassionate principles of science and efficiency to bear on the national crisis; relief efforts, while necessary, seemed less important than the establishment of rules of military organization that would maximize prevention of disease and effective management of wounds. Its Bureau of Vital Statistics, its inspections of camps and of soldiers, represented important manifestations of the effort to use the war as a kind of natural scientific experiment. “The vast proportions of our national Armies,” wrote Charles Stillé in his official report of commission activities during the war, “…afforded facilities not likely to occur again…and it would have been most unfortunate had the opportunities thus afforded for the study of large numbers of men in their hygienic and physiological relations, been suffered to pass unimproved.” Led by well-connected members of a wealthy elite, the Sanitary Commission attained a size and financial strength, as well as a public influence and reach, that far exceeded that of the Christian Commission.15
But just as the Christian Commission was compelled by the demands of war to redirect its focus to this world from the next, so the Sanitarians—especially agents amid the misery of the battlefields—found themselves inevitably caught up in the pressing human needs of the moment. In the problem of handling the unidentified dead and wounded, issues of order and humanitarianism converged. Recognizing that before the desired revolution of science and prevention could be effected, “a vast amount of suffering would ensue” requiring “methodical and large measures of relief,” the commission had established early in the war a Special Relief Service, which undertook such activities as distributing extra clothing, procuring special foods for the sick, helping discharged soldiers to find their way home, distributing reading